One of the predicaments that plagues us seniors is memory failure. I have written about this in previous posts, offering advice and palliative solutions to this difficult problem. But what we really need is an all-out effort to deal with this condition once and for all – to go for a cure.
We tend to think of sleep as a time of rest. Our bodies relax and our minds dream randomly, maybe making some interesting associations that we can discuss with our therapist. So I was surprised to read recently that our brains try to remember things not only when we are wide awake, but also while we are sleeping. Important research done at UCLA has demonstrated that one of the activities our brains engage in while sleeping is trying to remember stuff (in addition to wondering whether we should get up to pee even though the floor is cold or just try to hold it until morning). It's like our brains don't get enough of this during our waking hours. They need to sort memories out and file them away in their proper niches without us being around to confuse them with worries about where we left the car keys (in the fridge, duh?).
What I am concerned about here is that as we age, obviously our brains get less able to handle new information or even process the material that is already in there. So while you are sleeping, your brain is busy at work picking up memories, looking at the zip codes, and because they forgot their reading glasses, filing them in the wrong slot. When you are awake, these little glitches have a bad enough effect, but during the day, your brain is engaged in many other activities, such as driving the car, making you scream at the slow-motion moron in front of you, and then later, helping you spend an hour trying to find your car in the mall parking lot. It just does not have much time to devote to this memory-sorting process.
When you are sleeping, however, it has about eight hours of uninterrupted time to make a complete mess of things in there!
Think about this.
Remember Governor Perry of Texas during the Republican primary debates and his famous inability to remember the third item on his list of three government agencies he would close? Apparently he had a sleep disorder that caused this lapse. The Governor is only 62 years old; it's probably unlikely that he is suffering from early-onset dementia. What really happened was that after he fell asleep at night, his brain would get active in there and start remembering stuff and filing things in their proper places, but he interrupted the process.
It went something like this:
Perry Brain: OK... gotta sort things out here... lessee... three departments of government... need to put them in the GONE slot... Commerce... ok! ... Education... ok! ... and...
The governor woke up suddenly due to his sleep disorder, and his poor brain put the Energy Department into the fridge.
When we get even older, the brain might confuse these things on its own, so a clear solution to the problem is to train your brain while you sleep. You need to keep it on its toes or it might doze off at the wheel in there. This can be done through carefully implemented aroma therapy. Smells are well-known for their ability to stimulate memories. Stimulating your brain while you sleep by making it register nice smells and bad odors will not only help it to sort your memories properly but also give you a mechanism for triggering them again once you are awake!
It's a win-win solution.
Forget where you left your car keys? Just sniff that herbal shampoo and bingo, you will know immediately to look in the fridge. Can't remember that song that you loved when you were in college? Smell that rotten fish and presto, you will have it stuck in your head all day.
Only by taking active steps to keep our brains awake and functioning properly in our sleeping heads can we be assured that our active hours won't be plagued by forgetfulness. To paraphrase an old proverb, For the want of a memory, a Presidency was lost.
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